Perhaps not last words, at the rate that the US is collapsing as other countries ditch the USD$, its only a matter of time until the sheer cost of trying to control the world brings the US to it knees and it give up smashing small countries and massacring their populations. This is not without its benefits as the USD$ will dive which will knacker the corporations that have been outsourcing American jobs and the price of American labour will start to make American manufacturing competitive again.

I only support the 99% of America (Main Street), its government is owned and funded by Wall street and its security services have gone off the deep end, the FBI are still into little boys, CIA black ops are funded by drug money and Homeland Security kiss the arse of the corporations that are phuking the US. Now the smart money either goes north if you can tolerate the cold and Canadian senses of humour or "él, hombre" improve your Mexican Spanish and head south.

What do you expect the US to do when the dollar starts crashing and its influence in most of the world disappears? We're not going to Canada because it's too cold, nor Mexico because it's too crowded. Historically when a country loses its pre-eminence it just sort of fades away. Like Greece, Rome, Spain, UK, many more ex-champs. But USA has a huge number of nukes! For decades we (or "they", really) haven't used them, have even promised never to use them (first). But that's because we get what we want without them. With conventional forces, and/or with money. When those methods fail, USA will IMHO not hesitate to pull out the big guns. The rest of the world, including OZ, will be the target. At first it will work as follows. USA will peg value of dollar at the old pre-collapse value, thousands of times greater than it's really worth. Then demand that OZ exchange real goods for this worthless currency. When you refuse the threat will be invoked. And so forth.

USA will not go quietly! Those nukes will be used to maintain dominant position, when all else fails.

Now I hope you finally understand my point. If you disagree that's fine, I won't argue: you may be right, who knows, wait and see.

What is happening here in the US,reminds me of the old Russia collapse. The Russians were trying to hold on to Afghanistan against the majahadin(sp) and we (the US) were backing that group against the Russians. Now we are trying to hold Afghanistan,and it is reported that the Russians are helping the Taliban against US. It might smell like payback,it might be history repeating itself We may need to pull back,and let Russia wade into that deep freaking swamp(tar pit) we were mired in for so long.

@Yuri, that's ridiculous, N. Korea has no power at all. I expect China and Russia to get along well (brought together by common enemy) and lead the other side, against US/Israel. Neither is very expansionist. They're just going to want to control countries on their borders and re-establish their traditional spheres of influence. Places like Tibet, Taiwan, Korea etc will be solidly in China's sphere. Ukraine, Poland, and (in general) former USSR nations had better get along with Russia. Japan (and S. Korea) will be a bone of contention with China, and Western Europe, with Russia. These places are currently in US camp (the so-called free world) and will have to decide which way to go. But if WWIII starts, it will start in the Middle East.

Australia is in a great out-of-the-way position "down under", but sooner or later it too will have to choose between the "free world" and China. Get used to the idea of a "yellow invasion". Long-term you can't stop it, just make sure it's peaceful.

You've seen how US behaves for decades now. You've heaped scorn on them. You seem to expect Trump to start WWIII with some random twitter message. No, US will be stable for quite a while. But given recent history, how you can calmly expect it to go away quietly is beyond me. Just a short while ago they were viciously slaughtering Europeans, and confronting Russia with nuclear holocaust. Not to mention Japan, Vietnam etc. And surely you can see the long-term plans for the Middle East.

If you disagree, fine, maybe you're right. But simply getting my point across seems hopeless. Fortunately Putin and Xi Jinping are different: not dummies. No doubt they're well aware how situation is developing.

@anunitu, you're right US should get out of Afghanistan and hope Putin is dumb enough to get back in. But neither is likely. I'm disappointed to see Trump getting in deeper but even if he were sensible, future US presidents won't be.

I actually do get where you are coming from but being outside of the main stream media driven bubble I get to see and hear things from many places that would be rarely accessed from folks in the US. Noting again that I only support 99% of people in the US, the remaining 1% are making a mess of what they are doing and have succeeded in destroying the previously held high regard the rest of the world had for American law and history. Smashing small easy target countries has not won the US any friends and the 99% of Americans have no say in what gets done so they cannot fix it yet they get the blame for the excesses of the 1% who simply do not care about how much damage they do to the US.

As you would be aware, the old Soviet under Stalin suffered the most casualties during ww2 (well over 20 million people) with Operation Barbarossa and the lesson was well taken that they will never allow it to happen again. From past Russian history, the Teutonic knights tried to invade Russia but they ran into "Alexander Nevsky" and a determined defence of the Russian homeland. In recent example during ww2 it was Russia that drove the panza divisions back from Kursk to Berlin and effectively Russia defeated the Nazi occupation of Europe. Can you imagine how much more difficult the western defence of Europe would have been if Hitler had not tried to invade Russia ?

To put this in a modern context, any country that tries to intimidate Russia is in for a very rude shock, the US has a very powerful military but its suffering from exactly what the European and US have foolishly thought about the Russian military, their hardware is getting old and is fast becoming out of date, their personnel are being treated like expendable trash and it is simply being used a a financial hammer by the 1% who still think they control the world. Fortunately for the rest of the world, the world is again a multi-polar world where no single country has the type of power that the US has had since the end of ww2.

In contrast the Chinese have used diplomacy and money to end up having good trading relations with much of the world and in 3rd world countries they build road, railways, hospitals, schools and give something back where the IMF, World Bank deliberately destroy countries by trashing their economies, asset stripping their resources, companies, state owned assets and the like.

I take your point that a desperate US may do much the same as Russia after the collapse of the old Soviet and rely on their stockpile of ageing nukes but then there is no country interested in invading the US, most of them just want the US to stop trying to interfere in their internal affairs by force.

@hutch, Ok you see what I mean, that's all I wanted. I don't have a crystal ball and can't really support my opinion, so there's nothing to argue about. When push comes to shove I think these scumbags will fire off the missiles. Arabs have a really fine saying "don't poison the wells". That is, even if you lose the battle or war, leave the environment intact. US/Israel powers-that-be never got that memo. Their attitude will be "if I can't have it, nobody can". If they're losing, as a final act, they'll nuke. Or at least use that threat to get what they want. By then, everyone will know it's not a bluff!